1. Choose your first Dedicated Astro Camera

welcome to the dedicated astrophotography camera course my main goal of this course is to show you how to buy use and edit your images from one of these fancy dedicated astral cameras it's gonna be a big change if you're used to using a DSLR and there's a lot we gotta cover in this first video though I'm just gonna explain how you can purchase your very first camera that way you get the best results and you don't waste your money so the first thing we're gonna look at is zwl these guys are kind of leaders in the field at this point as far as I'm concerned that's because they have so many different products that work well together and for the price I'd say they're a great option you can also go with attic or a check these guys make some really great cameras they're usually more expensive and they're high-end but they're worth taking a look at and then you also have qhy but there's they're kind of like the budget prin and I hear there's some compatibility issues so I'm not really gonna talk about them today ZD OBO though that's why I went with that so I'm gonna focus on if we go to their products page you're on astronomy imaging camera comm we have deep space object cooled cameras and that's what I want to focus on today because these are really what you want to look at before we get into the specifics I want to give you a general overview of how a dedicated Astro camera works because it's a big change from a DSLR the first thing you'll probably notice is that it looks nothing like a normal camera there's no buttons there's no LCD screen it's really just a case with a sensor inside and that can cause some problems because the only way we can even control this camera is through either a laptop or something like the ASI air and the way we do that is we plug in a USB cable to the camera here and then we plug the other end into again a laptop or ASI air then from there you'll need some special software to control things like the gain or the ISO and the shutter speed etc and even take the photos and if we look on the back there's a little fan here if you get a cooled camera and I highly recommend it you'll be able to set the temperature you want the sensor to be at whereas with the DSLR we're stuck you know if the camera gets hot it gets hot but this you can actually program it whatever you want it to be within breathe and of course in order to do that though you will need a adapter cable that's what this little plug is here that'll power the fan and the internal cooling but that's really all there is to the camera body itself another thing you have to keep in mind and we're gonna have a whole different video for this is what's called back focus very simply all of your different lenses and telescopes they reach a focus point let's just imagine right here and what you have to do is go all these different spacers and make sure that the camera's sensor is located right here if the camera sensor is closer all your images will be blurry if the camera sensor is out here all your images will be blurry and again will have a hole never the video for this but you have to go all these different little spacers you'll get them with the camera itself but it can be kind of a pain to even get a focused image right out of the box if you don't know what you're doing so that's something you have to really think about is do you want to deal with all the extra headaches of one of these cameras even though it does have some nice advantages over a DSLR but that's just the basics of what a dedicated a stroke camera is it's a little small kinda like a webcam almost and you're gonna control everything again through your laptop or your smartphone the first thing you have to decide and this is gonna be one of the biggest considerations is if you want to go with a monochrome or a color sensor monochrome is gonna be designated mm color will be MC so whenever you see those at least on zwl you know what that means so let's take the 183 camera here same camera except one is in monochrome one is in color you notice the monochrome right now the gate is $200 more expensive now this is important here a monochrome camera every single file you takes gonna be in black and white what that means is that instead of just taking you know a hundred images with your DSLR of Orion stacking them together and having a final image that become the same thing with the color camera here with a monochrome camera you might have to take four times as many photos take a hundred with red a hundred with blue hunter with green and a hundred of the luminance that's just some imaginary numbers you don't to do that but the point is with a monochrome sensor you have to spend a lot more time and money to create a final image it's to be higher quality than a color camera but you really have to think this through and see do I want to really want to spend all that time and money just to get a little bit better quality image you know that's debatable how much better the quality is gonna be especially if you don't do the greatest job on capturing the images and editing them there's a lot of factors to consider my thought process was I've been using a DSLR for the past five years it's been color I want to get better results so what can I do and I figured if I'm gonna make a leap to one of these new high-end cameras why would it go with color if I've been shooting color might as well go all the way and get monochrome that was my thought process but you might have a different one it's up to you to figure that out for me though as willing to spend the money and the time and endure the steep learning curve so I went with monochrome and that led me to two cameras though eighty-three here 183 and then the ASI 1600 I was originally considering getting the 183 here but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons so let's compare the two spec sheets here for the 183 and the 1600 and you don't have to decide between these to yourself I'm just kind of giving you the thought process I went behind so it might shed some light on some important topics once you've decided if you're gonna go with color or monochrome I would argue the next most important thing is looking at the sensor size as well as the pixel size these two are really going to determine basically how much zoom you have it's very complicated but the short of it is for the average person if you're looking at your images smaller sensors will give you more zoom likewise smaller pixels will essentially give you more zoom and the best way to visualize this is if you head over to telescopes simulator or telescope yes calm and if you got a telescope use calm there's a telescope simulator and this is gonna really help you visualize what we're talking about first you can input your focal length of whatever lens or telescope if you plan on using I'm going to be using a William optics space cat though which is 215 millimeters so that's what I've put in I'd recommend changes to whatever you want to use then we have the cameras sensor size right here right now we're looking at a full-frame camera sensor a nikon d750 and at this point frankly I think it's a little bit too much zoom because we can't really focus on one object I mean it's great that we can get two in one but generally I want to fill the frame with the object I'm photographing so that's one of the problems I have with this space cat is just that there's not a lot of zoom at least for a full-frame camera but let's now change to the 183 it has a one inch sensor that's much smaller 13.2 by 8.8 millimeters we can take those numbers put it in here to our equation so now look at the difference we can completely fill the frame with the Orion Nebula and we're using the exact same William optics space cat telescope the only thing that changed was the sensor size that's pretty remarkable when you think about it and there's a lot of stuff having behind the scenes technically but like I said for the average person looking at an image a smaller sensor is gonna give you a more zoom and frankly this is the reason I was really considering going with the 183 because with this sensor size it matches perfectly with a lot of the objects I'm allowed to photograph and I think that would be a great composition I can even go up to the Horsehead Nebula get all that in the frame same with the Andromeda galaxy etc if we go back to Orion though now we're gonna swap over to the ASI 1600's sensor sites it's a micro four-thirds that's gonna be a little bit larger 17.7 by 13.4 so we can put that in and there we go it's much wider now you could argue it's a little bit too wide but I think that's not terrible and the other thing I was thinking about is that you know from time to time I could put on my 150 to 600 and I can maybe have 500 millimeters and then I can really zoom in as far as I want to so really that was my main consideration why I went with the 1600 because I felt that overall it was a more well rounded camera a little bit larger sensor I had more flexibility as well as the pixel sizes larger that's gonna usually translate to a little bit better noise performance so the ASI 183 had very small pixels 2.4 whereas the 69s 3.8 that's much larger and this brings up a whole nother topic which is called arcseconds per pixel I don't really want to get into that too much in this video because I think it's gonna just confuse a lot of people so if you want learn more about that head over to my website I've got a blog post here it pretty much sums up everything I discuss in this video and goes into even more detail very simply though if we scroll down here to this graph this is just the easiest way to visualize it this is from a check they made this graph up very nice of them it really helps us out so up top we have telescope focal lengths and millimeters versus the pixel size and micrometers or um and if you see number in orange that's good so for example 600 millimeters on a 6 micrometer pixel size sensor is gonna give you great results usually we want to be between around 2 to 1 that's ideal for the numbering you can even input whatever your camera's pixel sizes divide it by the focal length multiply that number by 206 and that's gonna give you your rating here that you can look on the graph so again I don't want to get overly technical here but my nikon d750 has a pixel size of 5.95 if we divide that by 600 millimeters that gives us ultimately two arc seconds that's perfect to arc seconds is a great number however if we use the semi 200 millimeter lens on my nikon d750 we're getting six point one that's really not good it's not enough zoom basically and we see six point one kind of down here the technical term for that is under sampling so very simply under sampling means you don't have enough zoom in this case 7200 isn't enough zoom if you get over here though we're going below the number one 0.95 and smaller and then you have too much zoom and you can see we're getting really high up in focal length here so what you want to do is have the right amount of zoom for the size of your sensor that's really what it comes down to and if you just look at the equation up here plug in your numbers and just make sure your between one and two for your rating if you do that you're good if you're higher than two you're gonna be under sampling in other words you need more zoom if you're lower than one then you know you have too much zoom that's really all that means hopefully that makes sense I recommend reading the article though and just really understanding all of this getting back to my decision though between the pixel size and the sensor size for me I thought the ASI 183 was just a little bit too much and I figured a much safer choice especially for my first camera would it be the 1600 so that's why I decided to go with and again I recommend doing your own research on all these different things and how they're gonna correlate to your current setup and used telescope is for that just so you can visualize how it's all gonna look one other important note there's a website called cloudy nights I'm sure most of you have heard of this before but they have a really great forums and if you even just going google and type in you know ASI 1600 let's say amp glow that's kind of a normal problem cameras have one of the first results is cloudy nights so the point here is that cloudy nights if you have any kind of questions about a camera has probably already been answered on the website and then you can quickly see if you're gonna have some problems or not this is a great resource when you're buying your first camera or anything else for astrophotography alright I think we've covered enough in this very first video for the course in the next video we're gonna talk about filters and how they work with either monochrome or color camera just to recap though make sure we're all on the same page I recommend going with ZW oh you don't have to do use them there's other manufacturers out there like edik attic whatever it is but for zwl we have the deep space cooled cameras you can do monochrome mm or your new color MC I decide to go with monochrome because I want the highest quality image as possible I also had some money I could spend on the filters and I have plenty of time to invest in this whole new workflow if you got a tight budget don't have a lot of free time then frankly I think the monochrome camera might be a mistake just because the amount of working I have to do to get a final image it's gonna be noticeably longer and for some people it might just not be worth extra headache but then again you know if you're gonna get a color camera you might wanted to stick with your DSLR for a while you can get still get great shots with the DSLR you don't need one of these fancy cameras either way if you decide you want to go with the dedicated astro camera and you've said and you know maybe I'll go with color or mono the next thing to look at really is the pixel size and the sensor size as we discussed smaller sensors in some aspects are great because if you have a relatively short focal length like I do you can still get a great image that's really the way I think about it if you've got a big telescope though like a thousand millimeters and in that case you're really gonna fill the frame there are ways to reduce that where there's this term here Barlow or reducer I recommend doing your own research because we don't have time to get into that but basically you can you know reduce things or make them larger with certain optics but that's getting above the scope of this course so make sure that you not only use telescope is to verify that it's gonna work with your current lens or telescope also check out my website and also this chart and do your own calculations to make sure that you're not going to be under sampling or over sampling once you've got all that figured out and then finally you can start looking at the more technical features like quantum efficiency full well capacity etc that's getting a little bit overkill though for your first camera most of these cameras are going to work just fine and you don't really have to worry about how sensitive it is to light especially if it's a monochrome camera you know it's gonna be pretty darn sensitive and the full well that's just like how much light it can capture before you clip the data very basically anyway there's one more thing I forgot to mention and that is the fact that these are all cooled cameras and if we scroll down here you can see there's a little fan on the back there's also a heatsink and some other components inside the camera and you can actually control how cool you want the cameras sensor to be which is really awesome if you're coming from in DSLR well we have no control at all and this is the back of the gwo cameras we have USB ports these are going to connect to your laptop or the ASI air and then we have a little power adapter here I want to be clear at least the 1600 does not come with the power cable that you need to power the fan and everything the camera will still work but you won't have any the cooling features so when you buy your first camera if you think about getting one make sure it comes with a cable to power it if not in my case what I had to do was buy this little zwl adapter cable and I would recommend just doing some more research on that for yourself make sure you get the right type because you can Milan Amazon for cheaper szw old ones like 30 bucks but you will need that cable to power the cooling system inside the camera and then we'll talk about actually set all this up later on in another video I just want to make sure I included that as well because if you were to look at their planetary cameras for example none of these have any cooling they're very simplistic and that's just something you gotta watch out for if you're buying a dedicate a stroke camera generally you want to make sure it has the ability to be cooled and the cheaper ones like these guys here for planetary do not have any kind of cooling built in whatsoever so make sure you keep that in mind as well so I hope this video cleared up how to purchase your first dedicated Astro camera again my thought process was I want the highest quality image as possible I've got money I've got time I'm going with monochrome and I chose the Eisai 1600 because it seemed like a good overall camera if you don't want to invest in a filter wheel and filters and spend a lot more time taking your images stick with your DSLR or consider upgrading to a color camera and that'll simplify the workflow quite a bit more all right well in the next video we're gonna talk about filters because that's a really critical component of your setup and there's a lot we got to cover there as well if you have a question you can leave a comment I can't really get into specific camera models again that's why I recommend using cloudy unites it's probably already been answered over there and so I got for you today thanks for watching and I'll catch you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Peter Zelinka

Views: 45,034

Keywords: astrophotography, dedicated astro camera, ccd camera, cmos camera, nebula, zwo, qhy, atik, pixel size, sensor size, which camera should i buy, asi 1600mm pro, asi183

Id: aCJxSSykli4

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020